Mini-MBA™: Customer-Centric Management- Curriculum

Fundamentals of Customer Experience

This session will cover the who, what, where and why of customer experience at the 50, 000 ft. level and sets the tone for the deeper level content throughout the week. It's putting people – your customers, employees and suppliers - at the center of your business, having them at the table with you to understand and act on their wants and needs. It's why Google, Amazon, Apple, Disney and other industry leaders continue to outperform and deliver strategic business outcomes. These companies understand the need to always consider 3 fundamental questions:

Who is your audience?

What are they trying to do?

How does your brand/product/service help them do it?

Many companies and leaders think they know the answer to these questions, but their efforts ultimately fail (sometimes dismally). Why? Are they taking on "inside out" approach, focusing on the needs of their business/KPIs/agencies without given attention and voice to the prospects and customers they serve?

Key Takeaways:

Learn about customer experience – what it is, why it’s important

Understand the key drivers to a successful customer experience

Where in the org does customer-centric fit, and how can you broaden it’s reach in your organization

Customer Experience Strategy: Experience Based Differentiation

This takes the fundamentals of customer experiences and frames them in a strategic business context. Knowing your company, your customer and your competition is vital to experience-based differentiation. This module will help managers charged with experience transformation to align strategic business objectives to a line-of-site to the experiences that people have with your brand.

Key Takeaways:

Moving from tactical to strategic user and customer-centric design

Aligning experience design with your company's business strategy

Creating a data-driven user model

Design thinking for feature set innovation

Creating an experience design strategy

Communicating your UX strategy to executives, partners, and your team

CX Psychology: What Makes Customers (and You) Happy?

You will be happy if your customers are happy. This module relies on findings from psychology and behavioral economics to help you understand what drives customer happiness. You will learn how the Customer Experience (CX) can be perfected by applying concepts such as “loss aversion” and “hyperbolic discounting." For instance, you will understand which touchpoints in the CX journey you should focus more on; how you should manage the environment and rely on gentle nudges to shape CX; and how you should use the math of CX psychology to make your customers happy.

Key Takeaways:

Peak-end rule: Focus on the touchpoints that matter during the CX journey

The interaction between a customer and a business is where value is created for each. Visualizing the touchpoints between the two exposes new opportunities for improvement and growth. Experience maps align customer-business interactions in a way that gives strategic focus to create solutions with impact. Journey mapping is an exercise intended to offer organizations a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience from initial contact throughout the relationship, with a goal of helping organizations gain an overall understanding of the customer and their needs. With this data in hand, it becomes clear that caring for the customer can no longer be confined to the customer service department; rather, it must be the responsibility of everyone within an organization to meet the customer’s needs.

Applying journey mapping data to the six core CX competencies (that will be discussed during this session) gives organizations insight into how to get the entire organization focused on customer care. Traditional journey mapping sessions can consume a great deal of time and resources. This session is intended to provide participants with an abbreviated yet effective means for understanding the customer journey through their interaction with a company’s products and services.

Key Takeaways:

Learn the principles and process for touchpoint alignment, showing value creation for the customer and for the business.

Acquire the skills needed to initiate and conduct an experience mapping project.

People are at the heart of business. And no one knows this better than customer experience professionals. With CX transformations there are two groups of people that should be at the center of this shift - your customers and your employees. But how do you do this? It starts with harnessing empathy and developing a disciplined process through Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employees programs. In this module, you will learn how to capture customer and employee voice through various feedback mechanisms; analyze the feedback and develop insights; turn those insights into actionable strategies and tactics; and close the loop with customers, employees and your broader network of partners.

Learn the importance of VOC programs as part of your CX efforts

Understand the different types of VOC and when & how to employ each

Apply VOC insights to various scenarios and business needs

Understand the other side of the VOC coin - Voice of the Employees

Tie VOC to business outcomes

Customer Success Management

For any subscription-based business, in particular B2B software as a service (SaaS) businesses, customer acquisition is only the first step towards success. Retaining and optimizing an existing customer base can account to up to 50% of revenue. The field of customer cuccess looks at long-term strategies for growth. This goes beyond mere account management and ultimately strives to maximize adoption. Customer success managers occupy a space between sales, customer support, and product development. Duties typically include: onboarding customers, monitoring customer health, proactively counteract churn and spotting opportunities to upsell. In this session, you’ll learn about the importance of customer success in subscription business models and how to actively manage customer relationships as a strategic portfolio of assets.

Key Takeaways:

Why customer success is critical to subscription businesses

How to measure and monitor customer health

Techniques to reduce churn, increase satisfaction and grow customers

Structuring the Customer-Centric Organization

Many organizations are very early in their customer-centric transformation or, in some cases, have not even considered investing in a customer strategy. This session will examine the key factors needed to put any organization in a position to profit from a customer-centric strategy. We will examine the elements necessary to establish a customer-centric vision, how to align key stakeholders and the need for strong leadership as your organization heads towards customer-centricity. In addition, the session will discuss what tools your organization will need to have in place to execute on your customer strategy.

Key Takeaways:

Learn why leading companies are increasingly investing in a customer-centric strategy

Learn the keys to successfully building a customer-centric organization including strong leadership, setting a vision and aligning key stakeholders

Examine strategies for combating common obstacles that plague organizations as they move towards a customer-focused culture

Understand the key technologies and competencies that are necessary to execute a customer strategy

Measurement, Metrics and ROI

As a leader, the knowledge of digital measurement will empower you to make better investment decisions throughout your business. ROI maximization includes partnering with agencies and service providers to create an ecosystem of success, and knowing the right questions to ask of your team or partners is critical. This session will explore key frameworks for measuring digital effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).

Key Takeaways:

Understanding how customer-centric metrics fit into a voice of the customer program

Focusing on the right metrics that capture the customer experience

Finding the balance of qualitative and quantitative metrics

Learn the most important uses for measurement

Customer-Centric Organizational Leadership and Transformation

How do you evangelize customer centricity and create a shared vision within your organization? Learn the best ways to parlay your leadership style in a way that engages and inspires your managed employees and business colleagues to adopt and deliver a customer-centric business strategy. This session will focus on ensuring that the customer experience initiatives undertaken by your organization are visible, understood and supported by your employees.

Key Takeaways:

Learn the framework for being a catalyst for transformation

Learn key steps to create customer-centric abilities

Be able to identify what true transformation looks like

A Simplified Approach To Building Customer Experiences

Understand what an ideal technology stack looks like, and how to get it without draining your resources. In this session, Blake Morgan explains the critical components of a customer experience technology program. She gives examples of technology that delivers great CX, and presents a practical approach for IT innovations and amazing ROI. Learn to build a business case that takes the “scary” out of CX technology.

Key Takeaways:

Gain a thorough understanding of what a customer experience technology stack actually is